Okay...think about it slowly. The heel comes down as the momentum is moving "forward". As this is happening the muscles in the middle are readying the toes, which get rolled into as the knee gets right above them, lifting the heel. Now the weight is moving from the palm of the foot to the ball, with the weight now more onto the toes. The knee is far forward now, and with momentum still carrying the lever arm, the ball of the foot is lifted, and lastly come the toes.
The amount of bones, ligaments, and muscles being contained in the ankle/foot conglomerate, like some multinational corporation abusing workers, gets overlooked on a constant basis, like folks who just want cheap bananas.
Taking for granted how complicated a thing like walking is, you never think about having to think about doing it. That's kinda where I am at the moment: having to learn how to walk.
My knee is achy, at most, but my ankle (holy shit my fucking ankle!) is what is causing my wrinkles in progress. My thigh still looks like a crackhead thigh, while my calf is starting to regain mass. Every day I take steps towards taking a step, and this all happens in slow motion, as I balance myself and watch in a mirror. I hop and hobble through daily activities, all the while imaging the motion and action of taking a step.
Learning to walk is much harder than you think. Maybe because most of us learn to walk at a time that we don't have faculties to understand that we're learning a complicated balancing act. When you're a toddler, you make it up on your hind legs and wobbly get around.
Balance is another thing of mine that's screwed up and needs to be adjusted. Now that I'm on two feet, I've come to notice that when I stand upright, my right foot--and the main bulk of my weight--is behind my left foot, by about three to four inches. When I bring my right foot even, making both sets of toes on the same line, my hips feel twisted, which is an unnerving situation for my brain. Part of my exercises are about centering my meridian and consciously working on my balance.
That and slow-mo walking, stair stretches used to strengthen my Achilles, and knee stretches to lengthen the tight ligaments.
Would've lost money on a bet about a broken femur recovery...never would've guessed it'd be my ankle causing the most pain.
Relearning to walk, though, is a challenge to which it's nice to finally be getting.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Birthmark and Rory Calhoun
Being dropped off at the bus-stop by Corrie, who needed to get to a meeting, I crutched it over an onto the carriage. There is a bus that, for just a buck, takes passengers from Long Beach all the way to Redondo Beach. One stop along the way is the hospital I've been using. Easy money.
The bus had two separate times where it filled up with high school kids, and then emptied nearly entirely at specific stops. Wild.
Eventually I was getting up to the openings, and the day's heat was beginning to make itself known. The heat wave that struck the Southland hadn't broken yet, and at ten after eight in the morning it was pleasant out, but the high pressure front was tapping you on the shoulder and whispering in your ear.
My appointment was at 8:30, so by 9:25 I got called back to go and get my x-rays taken. Well, I mean that by 9:25 I was sent to a different waiting area to wait for the x-ray. Before then I had befriended a nice Latino descent man in a wheel-chair, around my age (maybe a little older), with his left leg in a cast. We were able to commiserate about left leg issues. He'd broken his tibia and fibula, both pretty cleanly, in a slip down three measly stairs at his mother's house. A lawyer was telling him that homeowner's insurance could reward him handsomely. He looked at me with a mix of sadness with the world and anger at greed and said, "I'm not suing my mom."
Eventually I got called back to have x-rays taken, maybe a few minutes before ten, and once on the table, trying to get into position, the technician asked me if I'd had surgery yet. I glared at him, and ran my finger along my 14" scar and said, "No. This is just a birthmark."
He was not amused.
Eventually we got to talking and joking, and he talked about how hot it was outside. I told him that I'd been at the hospital for so long that it had been nice outside when I'd arrived. I said it with a grin, and the guy was Nigerian, so he didn't really know what to make of it.
Finally I got to see a doctor, and by that I mean "doctor". It was another young ortho resident, another person I'd never met before, like all my visits to see my "doctor". Every room was full, so at first we talked while I sat on a gurney. She admonished me for still using crutches.
"The last time I was here they guy told me not to put any weight on it. Then, right before I left and after pushing the point, he said I could put just a little bit of weight on it," I was getting fired up and my tone in the last ten or twelve word was getting harsh. This ortho doc, a young lady that would otherwise be checking out my ass in tight jeans, looked into my eyes, but like she wasn't listening.
"I've been getting mixed messages every time I come in here," I followed up.
She just went into detail about how the femur is totally healed but since I hadn't been using it, the bone had degenerated a bit, and I was sporting a 55-year-old's leg-bone. She said I had to stop using the crutches soon, like really soon, and be aggressive about rehabbing.
I crutched it out of the office and into Torrance's sweltering early afternoon sun, and made my way to the bus-stop, seething with misplaced anger...maybe not misplaced, but not really useful. At the stop, I was muttering under my breath about the events and lifted the bottoms of the crutches off the ground, and started to take steps, baby steps.
By the time the bus came, I'd been pacing wobbly and gritting my teeth, but not needing the crutches. My ankle, through lack of use had become quite tender, and still is the bane of my recovery. But, I managed to hobble my way from the downtown Long Beach stop to the coffee shop I'd done so much work, and then hobbled my way home, all the while carrying my crutches instead of using them.
I resembled a drunken pimp. Right now it's not about grace, it's about strengthening the bone.
A scene played out in my head as I made my way from the stop to the coffee house, played over and over many times as I painfully went for it:
"You know who he reminds me of?"
"Bob Barker? Snoop Doggy Dogg? David Brenner?"
"No, no. You know the one I mean. The one who's always standing and walking."
"Rory Calhoun?"
"That's it! Look at him, standing like a little Rory Calhoun!"
That's me, standing and walking like a little Rory Calhoun. I might even accidently respond to "Little Monty".
The bus had two separate times where it filled up with high school kids, and then emptied nearly entirely at specific stops. Wild.
Eventually I was getting up to the openings, and the day's heat was beginning to make itself known. The heat wave that struck the Southland hadn't broken yet, and at ten after eight in the morning it was pleasant out, but the high pressure front was tapping you on the shoulder and whispering in your ear.
My appointment was at 8:30, so by 9:25 I got called back to go and get my x-rays taken. Well, I mean that by 9:25 I was sent to a different waiting area to wait for the x-ray. Before then I had befriended a nice Latino descent man in a wheel-chair, around my age (maybe a little older), with his left leg in a cast. We were able to commiserate about left leg issues. He'd broken his tibia and fibula, both pretty cleanly, in a slip down three measly stairs at his mother's house. A lawyer was telling him that homeowner's insurance could reward him handsomely. He looked at me with a mix of sadness with the world and anger at greed and said, "I'm not suing my mom."
Eventually I got called back to have x-rays taken, maybe a few minutes before ten, and once on the table, trying to get into position, the technician asked me if I'd had surgery yet. I glared at him, and ran my finger along my 14" scar and said, "No. This is just a birthmark."
He was not amused.
Eventually we got to talking and joking, and he talked about how hot it was outside. I told him that I'd been at the hospital for so long that it had been nice outside when I'd arrived. I said it with a grin, and the guy was Nigerian, so he didn't really know what to make of it.
Finally I got to see a doctor, and by that I mean "doctor". It was another young ortho resident, another person I'd never met before, like all my visits to see my "doctor". Every room was full, so at first we talked while I sat on a gurney. She admonished me for still using crutches.
"The last time I was here they guy told me not to put any weight on it. Then, right before I left and after pushing the point, he said I could put just a little bit of weight on it," I was getting fired up and my tone in the last ten or twelve word was getting harsh. This ortho doc, a young lady that would otherwise be checking out my ass in tight jeans, looked into my eyes, but like she wasn't listening.
"I've been getting mixed messages every time I come in here," I followed up.
She just went into detail about how the femur is totally healed but since I hadn't been using it, the bone had degenerated a bit, and I was sporting a 55-year-old's leg-bone. She said I had to stop using the crutches soon, like really soon, and be aggressive about rehabbing.
I crutched it out of the office and into Torrance's sweltering early afternoon sun, and made my way to the bus-stop, seething with misplaced anger...maybe not misplaced, but not really useful. At the stop, I was muttering under my breath about the events and lifted the bottoms of the crutches off the ground, and started to take steps, baby steps.
By the time the bus came, I'd been pacing wobbly and gritting my teeth, but not needing the crutches. My ankle, through lack of use had become quite tender, and still is the bane of my recovery. But, I managed to hobble my way from the downtown Long Beach stop to the coffee shop I'd done so much work, and then hobbled my way home, all the while carrying my crutches instead of using them.
I resembled a drunken pimp. Right now it's not about grace, it's about strengthening the bone.
A scene played out in my head as I made my way from the stop to the coffee house, played over and over many times as I painfully went for it:
"You know who he reminds me of?"
"Bob Barker? Snoop Doggy Dogg? David Brenner?"
"No, no. You know the one I mean. The one who's always standing and walking."
"Rory Calhoun?"
"That's it! Look at him, standing like a little Rory Calhoun!"
That's me, standing and walking like a little Rory Calhoun. I might even accidently respond to "Little Monty".
Friday, September 14, 2012
How did we get here? Czolgosz to the Soviets...
Okay, see if you follow this:
I think it was Wikipedia that had a picture of President McKinley up on the home page, and I remembered that Leon Czolgosz was an anarchist that killed him in 1901. The event was highlighted in Thomas Pynchon's book Against the Day, where anarchists--at the time the equivalent to today's terrorists or the mid-fifties communists (all around boogeymen)--had a place at the table of main-periphery-character attention. It was another anarchist, Gavrilo Princip, that killed Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 and set off what was then called The Great War, but later retconned to World War I.
Then I set about trying to find a picture of Czolgosz, because I had an idea of what he might have looked like (it wasn't the same guy). When I found the picture, using his name and the Google images tab, one picture had a scene from a play (starring women) and there were other names of assassins, one being Giuseppe Zangara, who in 1933 shot and killed the mayor of Chicago. In Miami.
See, Zangara's target, most everyone believes nowadays, was FDR, who was sitting right next to the Mayor.
That led to a link to the Philip K. Dick novel "The Man in the High Castle", which is an alternate universe in which Zangara's assassination of FDR was a success, and the story takes place in the 1960s, after the Nazis and Imperialist Japanese and Fascist Italians were victorious in WWII.
Reading a synopsis of the book, I was struck by an early sentence: "In 1941, the Nazis conquered the Soviet Union..."
Uhh, I don't think so. With Japan attacking in the east and the Nazis in the west, I guess, after maybe twenty years of straight war, those two may have been able to put the pinch on Moscow, but I don't know. What I do know about Russia is: 1) Invading has never been a good idea; and 2) it's full of fucking Russians, man!
With absolutely no intervention from America or any kind of help from China, who'd been battling the invading Japanese hordes since 1937, maybe...I dunno, I still don't see it, and definitely not by 1941.
I've never read any of Philip K. Dick's books, but I respect him. Blade Runner and Total Recall are some movies based on his stories, and that's pretty cool. The Nazis beating the Soviets? Funny that that's the stretch for me, and not androids or memory fabrication and implantation.
I think it was Wikipedia that had a picture of President McKinley up on the home page, and I remembered that Leon Czolgosz was an anarchist that killed him in 1901. The event was highlighted in Thomas Pynchon's book Against the Day, where anarchists--at the time the equivalent to today's terrorists or the mid-fifties communists (all around boogeymen)--had a place at the table of main-periphery-character attention. It was another anarchist, Gavrilo Princip, that killed Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 and set off what was then called The Great War, but later retconned to World War I.
Then I set about trying to find a picture of Czolgosz, because I had an idea of what he might have looked like (it wasn't the same guy). When I found the picture, using his name and the Google images tab, one picture had a scene from a play (starring women) and there were other names of assassins, one being Giuseppe Zangara, who in 1933 shot and killed the mayor of Chicago. In Miami.
See, Zangara's target, most everyone believes nowadays, was FDR, who was sitting right next to the Mayor.
That led to a link to the Philip K. Dick novel "The Man in the High Castle", which is an alternate universe in which Zangara's assassination of FDR was a success, and the story takes place in the 1960s, after the Nazis and Imperialist Japanese and Fascist Italians were victorious in WWII.
Reading a synopsis of the book, I was struck by an early sentence: "In 1941, the Nazis conquered the Soviet Union..."
Uhh, I don't think so. With Japan attacking in the east and the Nazis in the west, I guess, after maybe twenty years of straight war, those two may have been able to put the pinch on Moscow, but I don't know. What I do know about Russia is: 1) Invading has never been a good idea; and 2) it's full of fucking Russians, man!
With absolutely no intervention from America or any kind of help from China, who'd been battling the invading Japanese hordes since 1937, maybe...I dunno, I still don't see it, and definitely not by 1941.
I've never read any of Philip K. Dick's books, but I respect him. Blade Runner and Total Recall are some movies based on his stories, and that's pretty cool. The Nazis beating the Soviets? Funny that that's the stretch for me, and not androids or memory fabrication and implantation.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Tow-Happy Long Beach Department of Errant Automobiles
I was in the apartment, like most days, the later afternoon sauna hadn't happened yet---it was still early and nice inside. I imagined an era with a guy at a sun-bathed chair, a typewriter and a bottle of whiskey within reach.
Out that window above, on that particular morning as I awaited a Skype phone call, I heard somebody pounding on a neighbor's door. "They're taking your car! Get up," pound, pound, "They're taking your car," over and over again in a raspy voice.
I craned my neck and tried to see which apartment. I never found that out, but the car that was being towed was actually parked in the position that's visible in the provided picture. I was imagining a groggy person, stepping out on their porch and lighting that day's first cigarette---and then seeing that the car isn't there anymore. Maybe the long sleep was induced by a long night of boozin', and maybe the person thinks that maybe it got stashed somewhere else.
Fat chance on that though: the car had been in the same spot for five days, a big red '80s-era Camaro.
Damn, I thought. Lame for that person. My coffee was ready and my call happened, and just a pit later, still before noon, I heard someone else out that window. Standing on a second floor balcony not wearing a shirt was a dude, "Nah, man! Shit! I need that car...ahh! Man!"
I looked out a different window and saw the overzealous LB Dept. of Errant Auto Collection snatching up someone else's car. Meanwhile there's been a Volvo parked illegally for a week now: just a single ticket in the window.
In the span of two hours two cars get snatched up and stolen by the cops.
"Shoulda' paid your tickets," the official who'd been blocking the road to make it possible to tow someone on our one-way street was calling up to the guy on the balcony.
Taking their car away sure makes it easier for them to earn money, right? That system fucking works well.
Out that window above, on that particular morning as I awaited a Skype phone call, I heard somebody pounding on a neighbor's door. "They're taking your car! Get up," pound, pound, "They're taking your car," over and over again in a raspy voice.
I craned my neck and tried to see which apartment. I never found that out, but the car that was being towed was actually parked in the position that's visible in the provided picture. I was imagining a groggy person, stepping out on their porch and lighting that day's first cigarette---and then seeing that the car isn't there anymore. Maybe the long sleep was induced by a long night of boozin', and maybe the person thinks that maybe it got stashed somewhere else.
Fat chance on that though: the car had been in the same spot for five days, a big red '80s-era Camaro.
Damn, I thought. Lame for that person. My coffee was ready and my call happened, and just a pit later, still before noon, I heard someone else out that window. Standing on a second floor balcony not wearing a shirt was a dude, "Nah, man! Shit! I need that car...ahh! Man!"
I looked out a different window and saw the overzealous LB Dept. of Errant Auto Collection snatching up someone else's car. Meanwhile there's been a Volvo parked illegally for a week now: just a single ticket in the window.
In the span of two hours two cars get snatched up and stolen by the cops.
"Shoulda' paid your tickets," the official who'd been blocking the road to make it possible to tow someone on our one-way street was calling up to the guy on the balcony.
Taking their car away sure makes it easier for them to earn money, right? That system fucking works well.
Friday, September 7, 2012
Watching My G-Men Shouldn't Suck This Much
I try not to get too attached to my football team, the Giants. I have mixed feelings about American football, but I do have a very strong fondness for Big Blue.
While watching them fuck up their opening game against the Cowboys, I was getting agita. The last football game that I watched that mattered also featured the Giants, and we were in Honduras, the G-Men beat Tom Terrific, and I was drinking rum and beer and shouting at a quiet television.
For some reason the game was getting to me. Football isn't like baseball. In the World Series, say, you can watch the Yankees get beat by the Phillies while enjoying a nice buzz in New Orleans, and know that there are more games left. Football has a slow, in-game level of "ah, fuck they're not gonna fucking do it" set in, and I try to never let my emotions get that involved.
The first game of the season...it just shouldn't produce agita this early...
While watching them fuck up their opening game against the Cowboys, I was getting agita. The last football game that I watched that mattered also featured the Giants, and we were in Honduras, the G-Men beat Tom Terrific, and I was drinking rum and beer and shouting at a quiet television.
For some reason the game was getting to me. Football isn't like baseball. In the World Series, say, you can watch the Yankees get beat by the Phillies while enjoying a nice buzz in New Orleans, and know that there are more games left. Football has a slow, in-game level of "ah, fuck they're not gonna fucking do it" set in, and I try to never let my emotions get that involved.
The first game of the season...it just shouldn't produce agita this early...
Friday, August 31, 2012
Shots Fired! They Tell Me!
Living here in Long Beach you hear firecrackers, and other pops that are usually written off as other kinds of tiny toy explosives. Other times...well, you never know. I've never felt in danger, and never even felt like I've had to be paying attention to everybody like was the case in Bed-Stuy.
But the other day, I heard some strange voice over a digital loudspeaker outside. I couldn't make it out, but the tone was very insistent. I looked out the window, and then got as fast as I could over to my camera and back to the window:
Pardon the blinds reflection, but, if you look close there are a number of things you can notice. The first, is that there are two cops with guns drawn on that black gentleman. The second is that nearly centered near the top of the screen are cops hiding behind a champagne colored civilian car. The third is that there are cops huddled behind a cop car in the upper right hand side of the picture.
I watched the scene long enough to tell you that the guy who they had guns on, the black guy in the white tank-top, looked drunk to me. He wobbled and swayed and generally looked harmless. If he had still been armed, I'll bet you anything he would've been shot dead.
I went out to take out the trash, no small feat for a guy in my condition, and asked the crowds that had been watching from all angles what was going on. Somebody told me that there were shots fired.
Here's some of the crowd across the street:
The cops hung out in a variety of forms on the street for maybe a pair of hours afterward. You could hear people heckling them from the safety of their darkened windows for the entire time. But that's not really the whole story; folks spent almost the whole evening out on their stoops and front areas, laughing and talking and blaring music and mostly ignoring the hecklers.
But the other day, I heard some strange voice over a digital loudspeaker outside. I couldn't make it out, but the tone was very insistent. I looked out the window, and then got as fast as I could over to my camera and back to the window:
Pardon the blinds reflection, but, if you look close there are a number of things you can notice. The first, is that there are two cops with guns drawn on that black gentleman. The second is that nearly centered near the top of the screen are cops hiding behind a champagne colored civilian car. The third is that there are cops huddled behind a cop car in the upper right hand side of the picture.
I watched the scene long enough to tell you that the guy who they had guns on, the black guy in the white tank-top, looked drunk to me. He wobbled and swayed and generally looked harmless. If he had still been armed, I'll bet you anything he would've been shot dead.
Here's some of the crowd across the street:
The cops hung out in a variety of forms on the street for maybe a pair of hours afterward. You could hear people heckling them from the safety of their darkened windows for the entire time. But that's not really the whole story; folks spent almost the whole evening out on their stoops and front areas, laughing and talking and blaring music and mostly ignoring the hecklers.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Etymology and States
I'd been thinking about state manes, for some reason. I was thinking about the rhyme they taught us in school, the alphabetical rhyme, "Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas...", and it started to dawn on me that each of those four states has an Indian name, a native aboriginal language name.
That idea had sitting somewhere in my craw, and I finally went out and crunched the numbers, and tried to get a count of the native names in our states. Before looking it up, you get the feeling that there are a lot.
This is true and the numbers bear it out. Besides each of the "A" states, you have: Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisonsin, and Wyoming. That's 22 total so far.
I didn't list Indiana, which is an English word meaning "land of the Indians". I also didn't list Idaho, which is most likely an Indian term, but it seems to look like a white guy made it up (invariably inspired by Indian words) and it stuck around Congress long enough to finally get used. I also didn't list Oregon, which is either formed by a misinterpreted map of an Indian word, or from the french word for "windy", "stormy". How about North and South Dakota, combining English and Indian? Same goes for New Mexico, since "Mexico" is a word from the Aztecs about a region in their lands.
That would bring the total to 28. More than half.
While we're at it, the English clock in with the next most: Delaware (from Baron De la Warr), Georgia, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. That's 14.
We're up to 42.
Next we have the Spanish: Colorado, Florida, Montana, and Nevada.
That brings our total to 46.
Then from the French: Louisiana; and from the Austronesian Hawaiian: Hawai'i.
Up to 48.
Only two left. The first: Vermont.
Vermont has no real forbear in either English, French, or Indian. Since one of the militias that fought to keep free the area fought over by New York and New Hampshire, the area today called Vermont, was called the Green Mountain Boys, I think it's safe to say that "Vermont", when broken up like "ver-" and "mont", can be seen as roots beaning "green" and "mountain". This doesn't seem that crazy to me.
Lastly, we have California.
Many think the term is Spanish, since it's generally agreed upon that it comes from the Spanish novel Las sergas de Esplandian, written around 1500. In the novel, Calafia is the queen of an Amazonian warrior nation, and her island-kingdom, California, is one of the exotic places Cortez went searching for.
Scholars tend to agree that Montalvo, the writer, used the word "Calafia" as the name of the leader of an exotic people because the Spanish public would recognize the Arabic root "caliph", which is a leader of a group of Muslims. It would make sense to his readers.
That pretty much makes California the only US state with an Arabic etymology.
That idea had sitting somewhere in my craw, and I finally went out and crunched the numbers, and tried to get a count of the native names in our states. Before looking it up, you get the feeling that there are a lot.
This is true and the numbers bear it out. Besides each of the "A" states, you have: Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisonsin, and Wyoming. That's 22 total so far.
I didn't list Indiana, which is an English word meaning "land of the Indians". I also didn't list Idaho, which is most likely an Indian term, but it seems to look like a white guy made it up (invariably inspired by Indian words) and it stuck around Congress long enough to finally get used. I also didn't list Oregon, which is either formed by a misinterpreted map of an Indian word, or from the french word for "windy", "stormy". How about North and South Dakota, combining English and Indian? Same goes for New Mexico, since "Mexico" is a word from the Aztecs about a region in their lands.
That would bring the total to 28. More than half.
While we're at it, the English clock in with the next most: Delaware (from Baron De la Warr), Georgia, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. That's 14.
We're up to 42.
Next we have the Spanish: Colorado, Florida, Montana, and Nevada.
That brings our total to 46.
Then from the French: Louisiana; and from the Austronesian Hawaiian: Hawai'i.
Up to 48.
Only two left. The first: Vermont.
Vermont has no real forbear in either English, French, or Indian. Since one of the militias that fought to keep free the area fought over by New York and New Hampshire, the area today called Vermont, was called the Green Mountain Boys, I think it's safe to say that "Vermont", when broken up like "ver-" and "mont", can be seen as roots beaning "green" and "mountain". This doesn't seem that crazy to me.
Lastly, we have California.
Many think the term is Spanish, since it's generally agreed upon that it comes from the Spanish novel Las sergas de Esplandian, written around 1500. In the novel, Calafia is the queen of an Amazonian warrior nation, and her island-kingdom, California, is one of the exotic places Cortez went searching for.
Scholars tend to agree that Montalvo, the writer, used the word "Calafia" as the name of the leader of an exotic people because the Spanish public would recognize the Arabic root "caliph", which is a leader of a group of Muslims. It would make sense to his readers.
That pretty much makes California the only US state with an Arabic etymology.
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